Abstract/Summary

High ozone levels harm people and the environment, especially during extreme weather. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of these events, exacerbating vegetation-atmosphere interactions. However, current models predict inconsistent responses to warming, potentially due to simplified vegetation representations. We address this uncertainty by incorporating realistic vegetation responses to abiotic stresses into a global atmospheric chemistry model. By constructing storylines of future climate with fixed anthropogenic emissions, we quantify how temperature and humidity changes affect ozone and associated mortality. Here, we show that locally, vegetation and photochemistry often act in concert to amplify ozone pollution extremes, while increased humidity in the free troposphere tends to suppress background ozone levels. The latter effect becomes more dominant with increasing temperatures, leading to a widespread decrease in ozone pollution across the Northern hemisphere. The storyline approach is an effective method for disentangling drivers of air pollution perturbed by climate change.